Cav's Place

Despite the long title, this will be as quick as I can make it, so let me start with the fact that last night marked the first time I was unable to reboot since switching to Windows 7. Under Vista, this happened if some Internet Explorer processes failed to close properly, though I was sometimes able to still reboot normally if I managed to disable BitDefender quickly enough, while until the UPS failed completely under warrantly and I had it repaired, it also happened after very brief brownouts that it apparently couldn’t handle properly, for some reason making my computer very sluggish and unresponsive, and freezing completely if I tried to reboot normally. Last night, however, I unplugged the network cable while eating since there was a storm, put it back in when I got back, had it diagnose problems so it will get a valid IP address again, and watched it apparently unable to reset the network adapter. Hit cancel, tried again, it seemed stuck at diagnosing problems. So I meant to reboot, but it wouldn’t, hanging on the shutting down screen.
I had to enable the network again manually after the required hard reset, but it seemed fine after that. Just to check, today I reset the network adapter once again manually and also rebooted just fine, though I did also notice that I was unable to reopen a closed tab at one point. This last part was probably just a minor momentary issue, but what happened last night sent me rushing to the bathroom, so this definitely didn’t make me feel any better. The issue itself seems familiar, but the exact symptoms preceding it are not, so I don’t know whether this is how Windows 7 reacts to an ongoing driver or even hardware glitch or it’s something new altogether, which is clearly not what I want to be worrying about…

Otherwise, I’ve been struggling with another one of the ebooks I picked up for free off Amazon at some point. It’s short, but this Sunday it’ll be two weeks since I started it and I hope I’ll at least manage to finish it by then, just to say I didn’t give up on a book, because the writing style makes reading it quite tedious and the approach pretty much wastes the potential the topic would otherwise have, at least from my point of view.
Writing seems to be going slightly less terribly though, albeit largely thanks to the fact that I largely ignored the not particularly relevant action taking place in my story at the moment and focused on some of the characters talking to each other privately. Even that was far from what it should have been, but at least such talks are much easier to write and come out somewhat less dreadful than action scenes, not to mention descriptions, so two nights ago I passed the 300000-word mark as well. I’m still only at about 55% of one of six, so the estimated amount of time needed to finish it all is still around two lifetimes, and it’s still just a big pile of shit, but some sort of need to at least try writing it remains.

The part about OkCupid has to do with what’s obviously the next stage of the continued effort to drive that site into the ground, several particularly useful things being removed these days. The statistics you used to see while looking through somebody else’s question answers have been replaced by something that only tells you how many questions you have answered out of those they have answered, the navigation that allowed you to quickly skip to a certain page while looking through questions or on the forums has been replaced with nothing but one huge “next” button and one “previous” button, the search function has been completely removed when looking through someone else’s questions, the “activity partners” and “long-distance penpals” options have also vanished from what you could say you’re looking for, and I see on the forums that people say the notes feature is also gone, though I never personally used that to have noticed it myself.
Quite frankly, after driving the tests completely into the ground, greatly reducing the importance of answering questions, thoroughly ruining the matching system and all the other terrible changes implemented as a result of the “get a date or get the fuck out, and preferably pay us while you’re at it” attitude that has become the rule in the years since they were purchased, which either way followed several other bad decisions that they had taken themselves in the years before that, I’m surprised they even left the “new friends” option under “looking for” and that you’re still allowed to create and answer countless questions without being limited to strictly what they deem best suits their vision and interests there as well… But I guess there’s still time for those options to be removed as well, or at least removed for free users, and the worst part is that I still don’t know of any site that at least tries to be what OkCupid originally was.

Last but definitely not least, Sunday from 5 PM I guess I will be going to another protest, against the Rosia Montana mining project and fracking, though I imagine that other themes may be brought up as well. The one in Bucharest was originally announced as being only against the Rosia Montana mining project, since the Government has just drafted a law that the Parliament is set to approve as soon as possible and which essentially puts that project outside the scope of other laws, literally guaranteeing that the corporation behind it will get all required approvals and be allowed to do whatever it wishes regardless of any other existing laws or court orders, but another large protest against fracking was already announced on September 1 in Barlad, so after some initial disagreements the two events were joined and the others that were announced since then, both across the country and abroad, seem to follow this plan of action. As such, there is some hope that at least a few hundred people will attend, possibly even more, though there is also an obvious risk of problems with the police.